This Robot Is Powered by Pee

From bug eaters to pee drinkers, these robots of the future will be part of the food chain

In their still-brief history robots have, for the most part, been far removed from the organic world—they don’t exist in the realm of life and death, or hunger, food and waste. Robots’ existences are clean. They’re plugged in or recharged, and they work until they need a boost. But now some scientists are pushing to integrate robots into the rest of the food chain.

At the Bristol Robotics Laboratory, researchers are working on a robot scavenger, the EcoBot, a contraption that, one day, will hunt down its fuel—human urine—out in the field. The bot itself is a bit of a cyborg, an organic-metallic blend that uses bacteria, harnessed in microbial fuel cells, to consume human waste and convert it into electricity. Since not all of the urine can be consumed, the EcoBot, too, will produce its own waste. (Can robot-only bathrooms be far away?)

So far, the Bristol team have a robot that can move—slowly—and their fuel cell technology, running on pee, has been used to power a cell phone.

Tags

About Colin Schultz

Colin Schultz is a freelance science writer and editor based in Toronto, Canada. He blogs for Smart News and contributes to the American Geophysical Union. He has a B.Sc. in physical science and philosophy, and a M.A. in journalism.

We Recommend

Have you ever wondered how a simple shot can keep you from dying a horrible death? In this one-minute video, Ask Smithsonian’s host, Eric Schulze, unravels how vaccines boot-camp our bodies into shape, getting us ready to fight off deadly diseases